MY HOPES: It is 2041. You are alive. The world has changed. What does it look like? Create a few characters and a story around the world in 2041. Do it as a reasoned essay, a poem, digital art, fiction. Imagine the best. If you can't do that, go the other way -- paint us a darker story.

Responses to this Challenge

My name is Hanley Branson. It's 2041 and I'm walking through the streets with a bounce in my step. it's Christmas Eve and the snow is coming down pretty hard now and the wind is picking up. My hair is being blown around like crazy without my normal Janesville Cougars baseball cap. They entered the league last year and are already a big hit in Janesville, Petcock where I live.

Smoke fills the air, and bodies lie, groaning in the mud. That's one thing that never changes right? People will always die.Whoah. Whoah. Not so fast. That's not true, at least, not now. I'm an experiment. A short, fat man waddles over to me and takes my arm. "I am Neo. I will be your caretaker." With no further clarification, he walks me over to a path.

I crouch on the rock ledge, looking down on the salvage camp. A lil' spruce tree, clinging onto the rock shades me from view. Not that anyone would look up, anyways. They're all too busy going about their daily business. My little sister stokes a fire with a pot of water hanging over it. She grabs the gritty piece of flannel and uses it as a glove to lift the water off the fire, dumping it into the plastic trash barrel where we store our water. Then she fills the bucket again and puts it over the fire once more. I glare at her from my perch. I want to shout out to her that she didn't let it boil long enough, that she's going to get us all sick, that doesn't she know The Illness is coming north? But I don't, 'cause that would give away my secret place, where I come to be alone. No way I'd want all her kiddie friends following me up here.

I am 90 years old.The years have been kind. My body, aside from a perpetually sore left wrist and a creaky right knee, is in good, though rather rotund, shape.I have no right to feel this way. My life has been hard lived. I was a logger in my 20s, a fisherman in my 30s and a cook in my 40s. Perhaps it was all this writing I've been doing ever since.A half a century of writing. Fifty years in my brain.I walk every day. I lift those silly little barbells my wife bought though I don't call them silly anymore. Particularly not to her.She is 85. Some days I can't keep up with her. She has had us on a diet of meditation and yogurt drinks and fresh food and frequent visits to the local pub for years. She says it is good to eat well and laugh. And have something to do. She always has something to do.Sometimes she sighs and rolls her eyes when, upon inviting me to go help at the Food Shelf or downtown at the shelter, I tell her I have writing to do.